Kate Blair is the executive director of Savannah Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASA.) Kate was the local nonprofit leader that assisted in coordination of our first Go South cohort in Savannah, Georgia.

Sarah Mahurin is a native Kentuckian transplanted to the northeast.  She received her undergraduate degree from Harvard and her PhD in English from Yale, where she currently serves as Dean of Timothy Dwight College.  On campus, Sarah teaches courses in Southern literature and African American Studies: Go South’s own Dasia Moore took her seminar on African American autobiography.

For over 20 years, David Sneed has served as a trusted business advisor and/or corporate attorney for global, national and regional organizations based in New York, Washington, DC and Savannah, GA.  The majority of this experience has focused on advising executives at Gulfstream Aerospace Corporation, his current employer, Nextel Communications, Neighboring Concepts, LLC and clients of Hunter Maclean in the fields of aviation, commercial real estate, telecommunications, commercial contracts and corporate law.  

Service is an extremely important part of David's life.  Therefore, he is proud to have served as an Assistant District Attorney in the Chatham County (GA) District Attorney’s Office and as a board director or advisory council member for various service organizations, including the Georgia Appleseed Center for Law & Justice, the Judicial Council of Georgia Access, Fairness, Public Trust and Confidence Committee, StepUp Savannah, the West Broad Street YMCA, the Savannah Economic Development Authority and the Savannah Music Festival.  David is a graduate of Leadership Georgia (2017) and Leadership Savannah (2008).   He and his wife are program chairs for the Leadership Georgia Class of 2019.  They are both members of many other local and national social and civic organizations.

Born in rural Georgia and raised in rural South Carolina, David proudly claims both states and is deeply committed to improving the lives of all people in the South.   He is a graduate of Yale University and Cornell University Law School.

Michelle (PC '96) is a native New Yorker who has called Savannah, GA home since 2007. After graduating from Yale, she was trained as a labor organizer, worked as a tenant organizer, got a law degree from NYU, then worked for NYC government at a Community Board where she helped citizens get involved in government decision-making. After having a baby and being priced out of NYC, she and her husband moved to Savannah, where Michelle now manages his photography studio and continues her work as a community organizer on the side, partly because there are very few non-profit jobs to be had locally. In addition to helping start Go South's pilot program in Savannah, Michelle's local work has included founding and co-managing a food co-op, founding and co-directing a non-profit that funds training for Savannah's public Montessori school teachers, serving on the Board of Loop It Up, which provides arts education to at-risk youth, and general citizen involvement in local elections and the city budget process.